Friday, March 2, 2007

snot (is inevitable) ...

for my first three years in duluth, i kept a running tally of my favorite duluth moments. and when i hit five, i'd reevaluate and knock something off the list. but today, today is the best duluth day. i'd say the perfect duluth day, but that is so trite.

i love when something has exceptions. special plans that deviate. when my brother played traveling hockey, i'd sometimes get out of school early to travel to his tournaments. i always liked thinking: you suckers are going to have math. i get to leave after art.

today, all of northern minnesota, maybe even all of minnesota was under exception. everything. i mean EVERYTHING closed. it looked like this from my window:

chuck ditched his car on a random road when he got tired of spontaneous 360s and the taste of bile. when he got to my house, he seemed a bit. um. snowy. i decided he needed a drink. we may be here a few days. he warned me against driving to the liquor store. but, honestly, how could we play scrabble for two consecutive days without whiskey? that, my friends, is asking a lot.

i called loiselles, they were closing. i called last chance, they were still open.

driving there with zero visibility, nearly being reduced to manslaughter in the name of the drink, i thought to myself: here is the fundamental difference between us. chuck has common sense. me? i like to taste death. it tastes like chicken.

first i almost got stuck. then i found the entire staff drinking in the employee lounge. then i told them they may have to push me out of a snow bank. then they told me that is not in their job description. i gave them 30 dollars anyway.

chuck asked me if i had any pants he could wear. ??? um. not any fashionable pants, but if you want to wear a pair of capree track pants, i have just the thing for you.

so i did some stuff. he did some stuff. and he wore my pants. frankly, it ups the pants' resale value. bidding starts and $99.95.

i have little food. this isn't, like, a bomb shelter. so i offer chuck flavorite mac and cheese or kraft mac and cheese in the shape of scooby doo characters. he opts for scooby doo and then tells me it tastes funny.

later, twice, we go out into the snow. we bring beer. because we are defiant and we know that this place has turned into a mardi gras where no one showed up. we drink. we wander. we encounter random two-somes or one somes walking and we are having a kickass time. it's not cold. it is just windy. and there deep drifts for jumping games.

chuck takes this totally kickass photo.

we go back outside a few hours later and it is even better. we bundle. we jump into drifts. we make out in a snow pile in front of my house. all of a sudden i see a woman with a fancy swooshing hairdu approaching. except its my landlord in a funny hat and i'm just not wearing glasses.

he does not respond to the fact that we are in a liplock and long underwear.

eventually we all took turns jumping off the railing of the porch and into the snow piles.